the GIMP developers are proud to release version 2.2 of the GNU Image
Manipulation Program. About nine months after version 2.0 hit the
road, we have completed another development cycle and can bring a new
stable GIMP to our users' desktops.

About The GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, the GIMP, is ideal for amateur
photographers, web designers, and many other people who want to
create and edit digital images. It is a very powerful application,
with features including: channels, layers and masks; colour
operations such as levels, curves and threshhold; advanced selection
operations using intelligent scissors and selection channels; and
much more.

GIMP is free software, which means it can be freely distributed and
modified. This makes it well suited to be included on cover disks of
magazines dedicated to digital photography or image editing, or to
be included with digital cameras, scanners, printers etc. As free
software, its capabilities are ultimately limited only by the
collective imagination of the community of free software
contributors. More information about the GIMP is available athttp://www.gimp.org

Download

The GIMP can be downloaded as source code from ftp.gimp.org or from
one of the mirrors listed at http://gimp.org/download.html. We
expect that binary packages for the different supported platforms
and distributions will show up soon. Unless you are experienced with
building software from source, you should wait until binary packages
become available.

Upgrading from GIMP 2.0

Version 2.2 is an update on GIMP 2.0. GIMP 2.2 is fully backward
compatible to GIMP 2.0. Plug-ins and scripts written for GIMP 2.0
will continue to work and don't need to be changed nor recompiled to
be used with GIMP 2.2. We do however hope that plug-in authors will
update their plug-ins for GIMP 2.2 and adapt the GUI changes we did
with this version.

GIMP 2.2 replaces GIMP 2.0. It is advised that you uninstall GIMP
2.0 before installing GIMP 2.2. If you want to keep GIMP 2.0
installed in parallel to GIMP 2.2, you have to choose a separate
prefix which is not in your default library search path.

Help

The GIMP user manual has been improved a lot over the last couple of
months. We stronly suggest that you install the latest version of
the gimp-help-2 package together with GIMP 2.2. You will then have
context-sensitive help in almost all dialogs by hitting the F1 key
or by pressing the Help button which has been added to most dialogs.

Thanks to the pre-releases we did over the last month, this code has
already seen quite some testing but a lot has changed since version
GIMP 2.0 and we could very well have introduced new bugs. If you
find any , make sure you report them at bugzilla.gnome.org (after
checking that it isn't reported already).

For a detailed list of changes, please have a look at the NEWS file,
which is contained in the tarball and available online athttp://developer.gimp.org/NEWS.

What's Next

You can expect updated versions of gimp-gap, gimp-freetype,
gimp-plugin-template and hopefully also gimp-perl to appear over the
next weeks. The GIMP source tree will soon be branched so that
development can continue towards GIMP 2.4. We haven't yet made up a
detailed roadmap, but we will try to publish one soon.

Lots of people have helped to make this release happen. Thanks to all
the contributors who wrote code, sent patches, worked on the docs,
translated the user interface, reported bugs or just made helpful
suggestions. GIMP 2.2 wouldn't exist without your help. Keep it coming!